The following is from Versal 6, the literary annual out of Amsterdam, the Netherlands: http://versal.wordsinhere.com. Contributors include: Wiljan van den Akker, Marosa di Giorgio, Marilyn Hacker, Takashi Hiraide, Toshiya Kamei, Sándor Kányádi, Dawn Lonsinger, Emmanuel Moses, Sawako Nakayasu and Xiao Kaiyu. Order on website or pick up at select bookstore locations. Single copy: USD 15. 2-yr subscription: USD 27. Submission period: September 15 – January 15.

Versal 6

And Thus the Darkness Bears

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.
–Henry David Thoreau

Vertical in my dreaming, train-
spined. Platelets canceled in courier
dark. I doggy-paddle, hail a taxi.
Owl sounds aglow aghast in
the forest where my father arrives
as others, John Wayne’s scent. Field
of suture and desert. The dinosaur
picks up my brother gently, then eats
him. The babies’ backs are scabbed with
carrying. The world floods, grand
canyon first. And there is nothing so
startling as the bride who descends
nothing, glides through a period of
bystanders. A rafter body. A distant hum.
The church dispersed in her silence.
And the moment when I realize she is
there to marry me though our lips are both
a factual shade of cherry. Yellow yellow
the light socket drips, chandeliers
phantom in the fog. Here, in the lush
atrium of alibi I am holding a plastic fork
in each hand. There there dear. The silver
tigers glitter because they are starving.
What I’m wearing is made of paper
and my nipples show through between
two thin lines of blue. Music fastens
itself to the light—she’s somewhere in
the Smokey Mountain rain—and I
sway and caterwaul. The floor is creek
-deep, hermit crabs the world over.
Their tiny claws cut and the water
turns a pretty pink. My feet form
a perfect union, solitude the axis
with roots.